"Booby, be quiet!" esays by Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl

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These youthfully exuberant essays on translation, innovation, performance, and audience are compelling, delightful, and often funny: illuminating as Reykjavik white nights and sharp as the skate blade of a North American racing champion.

Start with this key essay, "The importance of destroying a language (of one’s own)":

The myth about the Icelandic language among the population– the myth that is propagated in the school system, fromkindergarteners to doctorates – is that in some ways it is a purerlanguage than that spoken by our brethren in Scandinavia,which at best is considered to be some sort of pidgin Icelandic,“broken Icelandic”, languages not really fit for proper discussion– let alone poetry! – simplified and almost childish in theirlimited capacity for the use of cases, inflections or the meldingof new words. This point of view, whatever merit it may have,has yielded a rabid conservatism within the Icelandic writers’community that, despite what people might think, and despitethe “official” view, is ever increasing: The idea is partly that wemust not fall into the blackhole of becoming Scandinavians......The need in Iceland to overthrow the language regimeis quite dire (“Tear this wall down!”). Viewing a language assuch a rigid object does not only promote idiocy, it is literallya pathway to fascism (“No pasaran!”). A postmodern fascism,of course – where people are caressed into action rather thanforced (“Make love, not war”). A father saying to his child: “Wereally do have a great need for protecting our language, we aresuch a small nation. Now, you wouldn’t want to live in a worldwhere no one spoke Icelandic, would you? You know, maybethen we would all speak Danish, and the pronunciation is notvery easy.”....Some weeks ago I was sitting at a café in Helsinki withtwo Finnish poets discussing the whole “writing in Englishas-a-second-language” thing that has become more and morepopular – there are several blogs in the world for this, bookshave been published – amongst those Leevi Lehto’s Lake Onegaand other poems – and as Leevi has pointed out it may be away for non-English speakers of gaining the upper hand onEnglish-speaking constraintual super-poets like Christian Bök,who could never enjoy the benefits of working in English-asa-second-language. ... Reenter: Experimental poetry. Sitting at said café, discussingthe niceties of actually having a common culture with theinternational avant-garde, post-avant, experimental, radicalwriting, language whaddyawannacallit, it also dawned on methat the need to fuck over our own languages is imminent. Well,it’s either that or jumping ship completely, somehow. Let’s say Ifeel aroused by the idea of fucking over Icelandic. Let’s say I’mreally, really aroused. It will hardly reach anyone interested init – seeing as the interest for such things is rather limited withonly 300 thousand possible readers – but perhaps it is enoughto induce interest in "less than seven people", which again accordingto Leevi Lehto is the prerequisite for changing the consciousnessof the masses. Reaching less than seven people mayeven be easier in a small country, within a tiny language.

“A major poet for our time — & then some – Charles Bernstein has emerged as a principal voice –maybe the best we have – for an international avant-garde now in its second century of visions & revisions." – Jerome Rothenberg on The Salt Companion to Charles Bernstein.

"A superb poet and great inventor of poetry, Charles Bernstein dazzlingly invents the essay for poetry: professing in a gorilla suit and white tuxedo.”—George Lakoff

Robert Creeley: "Bernstein’s is the most provocatively intelligent reaction to the general drift of mainstream poetry, and he is an indefatigable writer of essays and poems wherein the determinations of genre are largely superseded. In short, he has not only given brilliant instance of the confusions of contemporary social and political premises but has done so in remarkable constructs of their characteristic modes of statement, which are not simply parodic but rather reclamations, recyclings, of otherwise degraded material." ––"Help Is on the Way" in The American Book Review (Vol.14, No. 6, 1993), p. 18.